Various hardware and software systems are distributed in a large network system, each providing local management and maintenance tools. These management tools facilitate the local maintenance by network administrators. A tracing tool is an important network management and maintenance tool. Tracing is a process of inspecting messages that are received and sent between devices or inside a device. Tracing is an important means of network device maintenance, through which device failures may be located, user complaints may be handled, and service processes may be tested. Tracing focuses on data flows or protocol flows between devices or between signaling protocols. Compared with a log, tracing has the following features: real-time, able to reflect a service data process visually, and able to locate problems quickly.
Tracing is categorized into user tracing, interface tracing and service tracing.
User tracing is to observe locations and states of a user and message interaction relations and contents in each state according to the unique ID of the user, for example, Mobile Station International ISDN Number (MSISDN), IP address, account and employee ID. Call tracing belongs to user tracing.
Interface tracing is to trace the message receiving and sending based on various protocol interfaces. The foregoing protocols may be standard protocols in the industry or internal protocols defined by a device provider.
Service tracing is to trace the whole service process, including service information flows or control flows between different devices or network elements (NEs, also referred to as modules) in a telecom network or a computer network.
However, most of existing tracing technologies are targeted at a single device, that is, tracing tools developed for devices can only trace the devices respectively. Most of the tracing tools support only one tracing type, and the supported tracing protocols are limited by the devices, making it difficult to perform cross-NE tracing and end-to-end locating. Thus, when a service failure occurs, the troubleshooting efficiency is low.